Wireline and wireless Internet protocol (IP) networks have traditionally supported a best effort delivery of all traffic. To support enhanced services, multiple types, or classes, of services have been established and assigned certain quality of service (QoS) parameters that manage queues for each service type. The QoS parameters include delay, jitter, error rates, and throughput. The QoS parameters can be provisioned on a per IP connection or per flow basis through mechanisms such as resource reservation protocol (RSVP) or can be provisioned on aggregate flows which are classified into service classes. Internet service providers (ISPs) can utilize the service classes, their associated QoS behavior and QoS provisioning to provide tiered service offerings to their business and consumer customers.
The IP QoS architecture provides tools for marking IP flows, controlling and shaping the traffic of various IP flows, and managing various IP queues in each sector in order to ensure QoS behavior for each class of service. Queue management algorithms include head-drop, tail-drop, first in first out (FIFO) and random early detect (RED). The queue management in a sector may be on individual microflows or on aggregate flows which are treated with similar QoS behavior.
As mobile devices move across sectors, packets for the devices are requeued and redirected to the current sector, which can cause out of order delivery, packet drops, and other problems.